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Aol & Uncubed Present: The React.js Deep Dive

Here at Uncubed, we’re working hard above the Prosperity Dumpling shop to bring you access to cutting-edge skills from cutting-edge companies in as many ways as possible.

You could be…

*Lounging in your pajamas on our online learning platform containing a plethora of classes like How To Build a Powerful Personal Online Brand, 7 Ways to Create Viral Content, & How To Build a Front End That Scales, Tests, and Automates, from innovators like BuzzFeed, Oscar Health, & more.

From a “Lunchbox” hack designed to relieve the R29 team of a bombardment of lunch delivery e-mails, developed by Senior Platform Engineer, Travis Kaufman, to an “Alexa Home” hack designed to have an Amazon Echo control various home automation software developed by NYCDA Co-Founder, Zach Feldman, our speakers saved lives…one hack at a time.

Just the other week we held our second event of the series, The React.js Deep Dive at Aol’s amazing offices near Astor Place.

Who better to dive in first than Facebook, upstairs neighbors of Aol, and the creators of React.js? Paul Hou, Product Engineer at Facebook, took the audience through a history of React (and the controversy that came with it, i.e. comments like “Facebook is taking a huge step backward in time with React”). Not even at version 1.0 (they’re in 0.13 right now), everyone from heavy hitters like Netflix and Yahoo! to international engineers for Sberbank in Russia are using React.

Jem Young, a name you may recognize from our “How to Build a Front End That Scales, Tests, & Automates” class on Edge, took the stage next, representing a new company revolutionizing the way we purchase medication: Blink Health. Jem LOVES clean code (he made sure our community was aware of that). It’s the reason why he’s a fan of React’s simplicity and composability… “easy, breezy, peezy” as he describes. React helps Jem to bring the gap between design and engineering at Blink Health, making his product guy very, very happy.

Afterwards, Chris Regan, one of the masterful engineers behind Codecademy, the sleek, interactive tool for picking up Python, HTML, CSS & many more languages, shed light on how the company came to use React, “The Road to React: The FellowShip of a Framework” as he called it, based on the needs of their users. Beginning with Angular and moving onto Polymer, then Ember, and finally React, Chris took us through the pros/cons of each.

Dave Newman (Senior Architect) and Da Ke (Senior Software Engineer) at Schoology tag-teamed a presentation on they “rationalized React” for the learning management system. Like Chris, the team recognized it’s pros: unopinionated, low chance of conflict with other frameworks, and lack of need to control the entire DOM. However, they also discussed the fact that React doesn’t give you everything to build an app, emphasizing what you need to consider upfront if you’re going to use it.

We closed out the show with Tom Small, Software Architect at Offerpop. Did you meet these folks at NYC Uncubed? They’re all about building marketing tools that help companies engage with their customers. Tom and his team chose to build the company’s newest tool, the “Experience Studio” (launched in public beta the day of our event!) using React in combination with Flux. This combination in Tom’s view, promotes awesome object-oriented design.